This is a term I coined for turning difficult situations around for myself. Here’s how to practice inner alchemy, your superpower.
Changing your inner experience of a challenging circumstance is life mastery. The question is always: ‘What do I want this to be?’
When life gets tough, instead of thinking ‘I feel so powerless in the face of everything that goes wrong’, know that you can see things differently. You can choose to think how good you are at creating experiences in your life and marvel at the power of your creative energy. When the chips are down, fear may be creating, but you can turn it around to have love create with even more power.
Correct your perspective
When you ‘c’ things correctly, you become creative rather than reactive (c comes before r) – Neale Donald Walsh
You can learn to turn suffering into consciousness and disaster into enlightenment. Life’s not meant to be all slog and hard work. ‘C’-ing things correctly transforms an unpleasant experience into something interesting. Then you see what purpose the experience is beautifully, seamlessly and elegantly serving.
The depths of despair contain joy if you choose to focus on that. Happiness can be found in the darkest of times if you only switch on the light. The cause of unhappiness is not the situation, but your thoughts about it. You can bring out whatever aspect of an experience you desire.
By now you are well-acquainted with my shaky relationship with all things electronic. When my internet developed problems, my initial reaction was ‘I can’t deal with this on top of everything else.’ After a while, however, I decided to welcome it as a chance to learn. I took the opportunity to understand properly how it all worked. I felt an immediate centering, pulling upward and intense well-being. I have noticed this whenever I snap out of a limiting perception. I immediately feel the spaciousness of potential. I see a different world. It is not that the world has changed, it is that I have tuned into a different frequency, and there are many.
Life erodes the tonal of the average man, but it strengthens the tonal of a warrior because a warrior sees everything as a challenge – Don Juan
I have often had to sit through a whole succession of emotions before I settle on a constructive course of action in a particular situation. I start off in the initial ego-led emotional reactive space. ‘I HAVE to let them know/demand an apology/get them to understand’. When I manage to sit through all that without acting on my emotions, I get to the Self rational and unconditional love space. I realize it all doesn’t matter. The crux is that the irritating people in my life show me areas, I have not let go in. I can get to a place of being grateful to them for playing that role, for agreeing to be part of situations I create for myself to test my skill. The more I practice this inner alchemy, the more I have a choice in how I feel about situations. I become Self-directing.
Relationship alchemy
Performing inner alchemy on a relationship with a loved one you cannot be with, can change it from being draining and painful to enriching and life-giving. You can transform interpersonal energy through gratitude. Reposition the other in your mind from someone you’re attached to, to someone you appreciate, then from living in lack, feeling the poorer for not being able to see them, you’ll now feel the richer for having them in your life. You move from a temporal perspective to the bigger picture. You feel glad that they are there – shaping your life, instead of sad that they are not physically with you. You feel grateful for what you have and don’t yearn for what you don’t. In energy terms, the other is always a mere breath away.
When you cling, others draw away to protect themselves from your demands. Once you appreciate what you have in the other and are grateful for it in its present form, you can stop clinging and let the other go. Then you’ll suddenly feel their presence right by your side. You’ll know you have succeeded when you can ‘smile because it happened, not cry because it’s over.’
More tips for life mastery
Learn to accept ‘setbacks’ with gratitude. They are growth opportunities masquerading as challenges. A pessimist makes difficulties of his opportunities; as optimists, we make opportunities out of difficulties.
If you fail, remember that FAIL stands for First Action In Learning. Learning is not in winning or losing the game, but in how you lose and how you’ve changed because of it. Losing in a way, is winning.
A mentor of mine once said: ‘Life is a snakes and ladders game, which we can play to win or we can play to learn from and evolve.’
Visit www.freetoflylifecoaching.com if you’d like to explore some more.